BANGALORE, Oct 27: Indian police said on Friday they had foiled a plot by suspected Pakistani militants to blow up the state legislature in Bangalore.

Two militants carrying sketches of the Karnataka legislature were arrested after a gunfight with police in Mysore, southwest of Bangalore, late on Thursday, a police official said.

“They were planning to carry out this devastating strike. The satellite phone numbers had calls tracing back to Kashmir and Pakistan,” said B.S. Sial, police director general of Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital.

“We’ve averted a major disaster,” he told reporters.

The 300-room legislature, containing nearly two dozen government departments, is in the center of Bangalore, home to more than 1,500 domestic and foreign companies including Cisco, Dell, IBM and Microsoft that accounts for 35 percent of India’s software exports.

“A satellite phone, a laptop and an AK-47 rifle were (also) seized” from the suspects, Sial said. “Documents seized reveal they are from Pakistan.”

Mysore police commissioner Pravin Sood said police believed the Al-Badr guerilla group, fighting Indian rule in occupied Kashmir, was behind the plan.

The alleged plot to attack the Karnataka legislature came 10 months after gunmen attacked Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science, killing one scientist.

India blamed that attack on the pro-Pakistan Lashkar-i-Taiba, which is battling Indian rule in occupied Kashmir.

Two policemen were injured in the gunfight following the capture of the suspects, Mohammed Ali Hussian and Mohammed Fahad, Mysore commissioner Sood said. The militants, who were travelling on a motorcycle when they were caught, were part of a team sent to survey how to blow up the legislature, Sood said.

“The evidence is conclusive,” he said, adding that police were ‘on the lookout for more militants in Mysore’.—AFP